Britain: Yo Blair, Go Blair

How will history remember Tony Blair? As a clever politician who identified the middle ground as the key to electoral success? Or as a serial warmonger who took Britain into its worst military disaster since Suez?

A chance encounter between Tony Blair and George Bush was captured on television last July during a G8 meeting in St Petersburg, with the US president shown talking informally over his shoulder to his chief European ally. “Yo Blair, how are you doing?” Bush enquired nonchalantly.

The conversation that followed was insignificant but the media quickly noticed Bush’s lack of interest in the views of the British prime minister. “Blair sounds less like the head of a sovereign government,” noted The Guardian, “than a Bush official waiting for the boss’s green light – which he does not give.”

Blair might once have imagined that he had a useful relationship with the US president – he has long been derided by opponents as Bush’s poodle – yet that brief encounter revealed that Bush did not rate the friendship highly. Blair appeared as just another political leader with whom Bush was obliged to exchange banalities. In Britain, as polls were showing ever lower ratings for Blair, the greeting was turned into a poster campaign by the anti-war movement: “Yo Blair, Go Blair!”

Blair’s departure from Downing Street on 27 June, after 10 years in office, follows a poor showing for Labour in the 3 May local elections with the loss of 500 councillors, against Conservative gains of 900. The worst defeat was the loss of Labour’s traditional bastion of Scotland to the Scottish National party headed by Alex Salmond, now First Minister of the Scottish government. Blair’s unpopularity has had a dire impact on Labour, and his premiership is now regarded as the most disastrous since that of Anthony Eden in the 1950s or Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s: Iraq has joined Suez and Munich in the lexicon of British foreign policy disasters.

So what happened? How did the youthful, intelligent, eloquent, approachable politician of a decade ago fall into such disrepute? Some people always had doubts, but the scale of the debacle was hardly predictable. Blair was an unknown quantity in 1997, but friends from (...)